Recent comments by Vint Cerf, vice president of Google and one of the founding fathers of the Internet, about the long-term viability of our data has many wondering what will happen to our digital information over the next 100, 200, or even 1,000 years.

At the heart of the problem is something he refers to as “bit-rot,” decaying levels of information that can be found in our digital storage systems.

Much of the data stored on outdated mediums like VHS tapes, vinyl records, cassette tapes and floppy disks has already been lost.

We currently have no usable form of storage technology capable of maintaining its integrity for centuries on end. Without a breakthrough in this area, humanity’s most important memories – videos, photos, books, writings, and thousands of other informational sources – may indeed be lost.

Sadly, paper remains as our most survivable form of information over the next 100+ years.

But here’s where that whole issue goes sideways.

Swiss scientists recently developed a process for encasing DNA in glass and chilling it down as a way to preserve data encoded in it for upwards of a million years. DNA is an ultra dense storage medium with the potential of holding 455 exabytes of data per gram of DNA.

Since all of the information that exists in the world today is still under 10,000 exabytes, we have the potential of storing all of the world’s data in less than a cup of DNA.

Yes, we still have a ways to go before encasing DNA in glass and keeping it chilled for all eternity becomes practical, and we still have to develop efficient ways to store and retrieve information, but the DNA approach may indeed be the light we’re looking for at the end of this tunnel.

With that in mind, I’d like to invite you along on a journey into the far reaches of future information. Come along as we create a few unusual scenarios surrounding the “six immutable laws of information.”

The Great Cow Epiphany

A few years back I came to the conclusion that the total amount of information that we could glean from a cow was actually bigger than the cow itself.

By this I mean every detail of both the inner and outer workings of a cow, along with every synapse firing, repositioning and interacting of cells, atoms, and molecules. Unraveling every micro-facet of an object will produce massive amounts of information.

This means that if we somehow manage to extract every possible detail from of a cow, the storage medium needed to hold all of its information would actually be bigger than the cow itself.

By extension, if we extract every possible piece of information from the universe, it would only stand to reason that the storage medium need to hold it all would have to be bigger than the universe itself.

While this may seem to be an absurd notion, in light of my earlier calculation that all of the world’s information today could be stored in a single cup of DNA, it helped me put the information world into perspective.

Here’s where I got it wrong, which in turn led to my latest epiphany.

First, we have only discovered a super tiny fraction of all available information – less than one percent of one percent of one percent.

Second, information about a cow is not bigger than the cow, IT IS THE COW!

All information, ever created regarding the cow, is already part of the cow.

Rather than researching an external source, such as the great Wikipedia-compendium of all online cow information, we need only jack into the cow itself.

No, we are still a ways away from developing this kind of technology, but unless I miss my guess, it will soon become the holy grail of informational physicists.

Every object, along with every plant, animal, bolt of energy, block of air, or force of nature already contains every possible piece of information about itself.

If this is indeed true, it means we have a very very long ways to go in discovering every possible tidbit and micro-tidbit of existing information.

The Grand Unified Information Theory – Six Immutable Laws

Over the past few days I’ve replayed the Cow Epiphany over in my head many times hoping to grasp its far-reaching implications.

Yes, it’s similar in many ways to The Matrix, but as a movie, it left out far too many details to be useful.

Starting with this as a working theory, I’ve come to some crazy, perhaps even outrageous, conclusions. So without further buildup, here are the “six immutable laws of information.”

1.) The total universe of information is constantly expanding. Trillions of new pieces of information are being produced by the world’s 7 billion people every second of every day.

2.) All information, ever created, is still in existence. Answer to all of life’s questions already exists. It’s only a matter of knowing how to ask them and through what channel to pose the question.

3.) Every object is an informational source. Every object, cell, molecule, and atom already contains a complete history, functional attributes, and physical details of itself and its surroundings.

5.) Altering the informational code of life will alter life itself. As we change the informational base of an object, we change the object itself.

6.) Information is the lifeblood of human civilization. The overall efficiency with which we are able to discover, store, and retrieve information is directly proportional to how advanced we become as a civilization.

Our ability to archive and retrieve information is critical. Past civilizations have fallen apart over a single information gap. Future civilizations will be as equally susceptible if we don’t find a viable super long-term solution.

Over time, we will stop using storage mediums, and learn how to tap into the world itself (objects, cells, and molecules) on an informational level.

“Altering the informational code of life will alter life itself!”

Final Thoughts

No we haven’t developed a “Vulcan Mind Meld” yet where we can place our hand on an object and instantly suck out all of the information and understand it. But that might not be as far fetched as it sounds.

Every cow-sized piece of information comes with more information about itself than we will ever be able to decipher.

Our quest to discover new forms of information will be never-ending.

Much like the blood coursing through our bodies, information is the lifeblood of our economy, and a necessary food source for the human brain.

I installed my Nest Thermostat a little over a year ago. This “learning” machine was billed as being able to study the habits of people and adjust the settings to optimize both temperature and energy usage.

But ever since then I’ve found myself in a constant battle with my thermostat. It’s cooling things down when I need heat, warming things up when I’d rather be cool, and the amount of energy it’s saved is far less than the loss of productivity I’ve experienced from being uncomfortable.

This is also true with my other “smart” devices.

My washing machine still doesn’t understand the fabrics it’s trying to wash. My smart door lock still doesn’t know who I am. And our home security system does a far better job of keeping the good guys in, instead of the bad guys out.

Much of the “smartness” we’ve added to our lives has been in meager doses, slightly better than before, but not much.

That said, the level of intelligence in our homes, cars, clothes, and offices is about to move quickly up the exponential learning curve as connected devices combine remote processing power with everything around us.

Our orange juice bottles, cans of soup, and boxes of crackers will all have a way of reordering themselves when inventories get low. Toasters will soon be toasting reminders onto the sides of our bread so we won’t forget birthdays and anniversaries.

Biometric coffee makers will know exactly how much caffeine to put into our coffee, and our fireplace will even know what color of flame we’re in the mood for.

If I’m feeling ill, not only will my devices know what’s wrong, they’ll be able to scan my home and give me a quick recipe for a cure.

“Add 2 oz of turpentine from the garage, 3 tablespoons of shoe polish, four capfuls of Listerine, and 2 cough drops to a cup of boiling water, and what floats to the top will fix your problem.”

I refer to this as “MacGyvering medicine.”

Our learning machines will pave the way for a hyper-individualized world where everything around us syncs perfectly with our personal needs and desires. But that’s the point where the train begins to derail, and all our best intentions start to work against us. Here’s why.

Some Background on Machine Learning

Machine learning is an offshoot of the early work done on expert systems, neural networks, and artificial intelligence in the 1980s.

Since then we’ve figured out how to connect devices so one device can talk to another, added a pervasive Internet that attaches remote capabilities to imbedded chips, and today’s machine learning has morphed into something far different than anything researchers dreamed of in the 1980s.

With algorithms that can “learn” from past data, it uses sophisticated forms of predictive analysis and decision trees to closely simulate the human decision-making process.

As the number of sensors grows and the amount of data increases, the human-machine relationship will become more refined, and our ability to delineate between personal decisions and machine decisions will become an increasingly fine line.

At the same time, machine learning creates a number of quandaries or paradoxes for us to contend with.

Paradox #1 – Optimized humans will become less human

If every smart device were able to tap into the mood of people it came into contact with, it could easily make decisions for them, and in the process, optimize their performance.

I’ve always been drawn to the idea of walking into a building and have the building recognize me. Parking spaces magically appear; the pathway to where I’m going lights up; music in the air perfectly matches my mood; temperature, humidity and environmental condition instantly sync with my body; and impeccably prepared food supernaturally appears whenever I’m the least bit hungry.

This utopian dream of living the easy life certainly has its appeal, but grossly oversimplifies our need for obstacles to overcome, problems to wrestle with, and adversarial challenges for us to tackle.

When life becomes too simple, we become less durable.

Without the need to struggle, we become less resilient. If we were to find ourselves living the soft cushy life on easy street, every new danger will leave us cowering in fear, unable to muster a response to the hazards ahead.

Humans place great value on creativity, originality, and discovery. History books are filled with talented people who figured out how to “zig left” when everyone else “zagged right.”

Recently, a company called Qentis offhandedly claimed its computers were in the process of generating every possible combination of words, and preemptively copyrighting all creative text.

It will also be possible for them to generate every possible combination of musical notes to enable them to claim first rights to every “new” musical score.

Similarly, Cloem is a company that has developed software capable of linguistically manipulating the claims on a patent filing, substituting keywords with synonyms, reordering steps, and rephrasing core concepts in order to generate tens of thousands of potentially patentable “new” inventions.

In much the same way computers are capable of generating every possible combination of lottery numbers to guarantee a win, patent and copyright trolls will soon have the ability to play their game of “fleecing the innovators” at an entirely new level.

More importantly, it confuses the concept of originality, and compromises the contribution of an individual if a version of every “new” idea already exists.

Self-sufficiency will lead to isolation and our need for each other will begin to vanish. Without needs and dependencies, there is no economy. And without the drive for fixing every insufficiency, our sense of purpose begins to vanish.

Having a super intelligent machine is meaningless if there is nothing to apply the intelligence to. Much like a perpetual motion machine that never gets used, there’s little purpose for its existence.

How do we make the best possible decision?

Final Thoughts

Yes, I love the idea of having a laundry soap dispenser that is connected to sensors in the washing machine and able to mix multiple channels of organic ingredients dynamically to suit the conditions of the wash and optimize the cleaning process.

I also love the idea of not having to make so many decisions. Until now, every new device seems to add more decision points to my daily routine, not less.

However we need to be aware of the quandaries ahead. Not all changes are for the better, and many times simple little shifts will have far reaching ripple effects that force us to rethink our systems, our communities, and our way of life.

Sometimes our best intentions are little more than a mirage that leads us to an area we never intended to go.

If a billion people each gave you a tenth of a cent, you would have $1 million.

Over the past few weeks I’ve become enamored with the power of financial friction. This could involve everything from adding a tenth or hundredth of a cent charge to every email sent, social media “likes,” video downloads, views of copyrighted photos, and much more.

Even though it may not seem significant, there is a huge difference between “free” and “0.1 cent.”

Tiny charges, much like the rest of life’s sandpaper, tend to give us clarity between what’s significant and what’s not.

The reason this has become such an important topic today is because transaction costs have plummeted along with the cryptocurrency invention of distributed block chain ledgers, and the possibility of creating “nano-payment” networks is opening the doors to thousands of new fractional payment models.

The traditional way of providing online services like email, news, or uploading photos has been to pass the cost of operating these services on to advertisers. But that could change.

Over the past decade, micro payment schemes have created successful business models around charges less than $1. As an example, Google’s AdSense charges advertisers as little as a few cents for every click of their ads.

It’s only recently that we’ve been able to consider much smaller charges, even less than a penny.

In the past I’ve been an ardent advocate of simplicity, but over time my thinking has changed. Automation enables complexity, and the intricacy of complexity is what opens the door for unusual new business opportunities.

Here are just a few ways these seemingly insignificant payment schemes could become a big deal in your future.

Tiny Town Taxes

Tax experts have long understood the value of tiny slivers of money.

In the Denver, Colorado area, we have a unique taxing district called the Scientific Cultural Facilities District (SCFD).

Colorado’s SCFD is the largest cultural tax district in the nation. Collecting just one penny on every ten dollar purchase in the seven counties surrounding Denver, the SCFD collected $47 million in 2013 which it distributed to over 280 non-profit organizations including the Denver Art Museum, Denver Botanic Gardens, Denver Center for the Performing Arts, Denver Museum of Nature and Science, Denver Zoo, and many more.

Tiny amounts of money coming from a large number of people have the potential to dramatically shift everything from lifestyle, to employment opportunities, and culture.

If, for example, a similar taxing district were established just for funding live musical performances, Denver or most other large cities could quickly establish themselves as the live music capital of the world. Struggling musicians would no longer be relegated to the scraps that society has to offer, and being an accomplished performer would move up the status ladder to being a well-respected profession.

A similar approach could be used to bolster other communities of interest like makerspaces, art colonies, niche incubators, and much more.

While many may think this is going in the wrong direction, nano-payments could be used for ultra-tiny forms of taxation, even as little as a penny on every $1 million spent.

Leveraging the Lectrons

The only limitations imposed on digital money are the limitations we impose on it. These are human based systems, and every barrier and limitation is subject to human intervention.

As a way of expanding our thinking in this area, here are 8 short scenarios with brief explanations.

1.) When it comes to e-books, would you rather pay $7.99 for the entire book or a tenth of a cent for every page you read? With this type of model it would be very easy to run the analytics and determine which chapters, sections, and pages most resonate with readers.

2.) If you received a tenth of a cent for every “like” on Facebook, but also had to pay a tenth of a cent every time you “liked” someone else’s page or photo, would you be making money or losing some at the end of each month? How could this Lilliputian economy be translated in other areas?

3.) For photos with a copyright, whenever someone clicks to expand the image, their account would be debited a tenth of a cent. In this scenario, the owners would be incentivized to having their photos show up everywhere to increase exposure.

4.) As a blog reader, every time you click “continue here,” you would be sending a tenth of a cent, or multiple tenths for every page viewed, to the writer. Would this incentivize more blog writers?

5.) Would you be willing to pay a tenth of a cent for every page on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn just to avoid all the ads being directed at you? The amount you pay would be in direct proportion to how much you use these services, but still a relatively small amount.

6.) Should every text message come with the option of paying a tenth of a cent to keep your service ad free?

7.) When it comes to videos, should a pay-per-play charge of a tenth of a cent be added to every YouTube, Vimeo, Vine, Twitch, or Viddy play. Should people posting videos have that option for remuneration?

8.) Similarly, does it make sense to add a tenth of a cent charge for every episode of RadioLab, NPR, Freakonomics, or TED podcasts.

Fractal Transactions

A while back I wrote a column of the concept of fractal transactions, and this is where automation comes into play.

A fractal transaction is simply an automated point of money distribution. Money flows into the transaction, from one or more sources, and is instantly distributed to one or more recipients. While this doesn’t sound like anything earthshaking, it indeed is.

A fractal transaction remove the bottlenecks. By removing the person from the distribution process, it opens up many new strategies for doing business.

In its simplest form, a fractal transaction would involve a product or service. Let’s take for example a manufacturer who creates a widget. When an end customer sees the widget on a retail store shelf and purchases it, money flows into the transaction and is instantly split between the retail store and the manufacturer.

Going a few steps further, money paid for a book on Amazon would be instantly split four ways between the author, the publisher, Amazon, and the shipping company. Additional recipients may be a co-author, a referring website that gets a commission, or a warehouse worker filling the order.

The New Nano-Payment Paradigm

Yes, some people may view nano-payments as “death by a thousand paper cuts.” But in reality they’re just the opposite, the sparks that fuel a thousand new cottage industries.

A pay-per-use model could eventually replace many of today’s financing options. Instead of paying $300 for a printer, the printer could be free with nano-charges assessed for every page printed.

Every mobile app could be funded through an in-app nano-payment system that gets assessed with every use.

Video games could have a series of nano-payment options embedded inside each field of play.

Since opinion polls require so little effort, adding a nano-payment charge to the mix may be enough friction to make answers more meaningful. This line of thinking opens the door for creating a payment democracy, where users vote with nano amounts of currency.

Not only would we end up with a more accurate assessment of what people value most, but global voting systems themselves could also be financed and managed this way.

Final Thoughts

With transaction costs approaching zero, old school paradigms will fall by the wayside.

Nano-transactions are the key to unlocking efficiencies the world has not yet known. The tempo of business will continually ratchet up, new business models will begin to materialize, and the old ways of doing business will lose favor as the flow of money begins to short circuits them completely.

Disruptive technology is always most effective when it can be applied to lucrative industries, and banking and finance is one that entrepreneurs have had their eye on for decades.

Nano payments are easy to overlook because they requires so many of them to appear significant. But with billions of people online, making literally trillions of transactions every year, the numbers are already there.

In the words of Nobel Physicist Richard Feynman, “There’s plenty of room at the bottom.” And indeed there is.

At a recent video game tournament in Denver called ClutchCon, I was moderating a panel discussion on the future of video games, and we got into the topic of leveraging the time and energy spent playing video games into a “wisdom of crowds” approach for solving the world’s problems.

Video games have a way of immersing players into an epic challenge that consumes them physically, intellectually, and emotionally. While detractors commonly dismiss game playing as a waste of time, it more accurately embodies an evolutionary shift in human pastimes causing more synapse-firing per second than virtually any other activity on earth.

It is this heightened level of brain activity that most intrigues me. Educators would love to tap into it. Employers would give anything to see their employees as engaged at work as they are in games. And big thinkers who are heavily invested in solving the world’s biggest problems would drool over the prospects of applying ten gazillion well-focused brain cells onto whatever problem they’re wrestling with.

Passive engagement is far different than commanding someone’s full attention, and games have a way of engrossing players on virtually every brain metric for hours, sometimes days, on end. Gaming’s kill-or-be-killed situations force players to constantly push themselves to another mental state.

The addictive nature of gaming comes from players reaching pinnacle levels of brain activity where they are rewarded with an endorphin-like high. Ordinary kids are suddenly transformed into a swaggeringly ultra-cool superhero persona, and the accolades they receive for their digital accomplishments are just icing on the cake.

At issue, though, is our ability to transition “digital accomplishments” into something of real world value. How can we shine this spotlight of laser-brain brilliance onto problems like curing cancer, mitigating hurricane damage, or large-scale corruption and actually change the world?

In many ways, the path to making some of the world’s greatest breakthroughs is much like slogging our way through a labyrinth of well camouflaged enemy warriors disguised as old school thinking, failed experiments, and self-doubt to find those eureka moments that have been eluding us for decades.

So is it possible to cluster the micro accomplishments of gaming in a way to inch our way towards the macro accomplishments of real world problem-solving? Here are a few unusual insights that are guaranteed to explode your objections to video games completely.

History of Game Theory and Gamification

Game theory did not really exist as a field until John von Neumann published a paper on the subject in 1928. His original paper was followed by his book, “Theory of Games and Economic Behavior” written in 1944.

In 1950, the first mathematical discussion of the prisoner’s dilemma appeared as part of an experiment by famed mathematicians Merrill M. Flood and Melvin Dresher. The experiment was part of the RAND Corporation’s investigations into game theory because of its possible applications in dealing with the buildup of nuclear weapons.

The term “gamification” was coined in 2002, but did not become popular until 2010. Gamification is the use of game thinking and game mechanics to engage users in solving problems.

Types of rewards include points, achievement badges, entry into new levels, or winning some form of currency.

One of the newer approaches to gamification has been to make mundane tasks feel more like games with techniques like adding meaningful choice, onboarding, adding narrative, and increasing levels of challenge.

Jane McGonigal delivering her talk at TED

Enter Jane McGonigal

Jane McGonigal is a famous author and game designer. In 2010 she gave a brilliant TED talk where she speculated that the countless man-hours dedicated to game play is preparing humanity for the future, but so far we don’t know what that future might be.

She believes gaming has the potential to solve social ills and improve our quality of life.

McGonigal says that gamers around the world are learning four valuable skills, skills she refers to as the “four superpowers:”

1. Urgent Optimism – Urgent optimism is the desire to act immediately to tackle an obstacle, combined with the belief that we have a reasonable hope of success. Gamers always believe that an epic win is possible, and that it is always worth trying.

2. Weaving a Tight Social Fabric – Research shows that we like people better after we play a game with them, even if they’ve beaten us badly. The reason behind this is that it takes a lot of trust to play a game with someone. We trust that they will spend their time with us, that they will play by the same rules, value the same goals, and stay with the game until it’s over.

3. Blissful Productivity – People playing a game are actually happier working hard than most of us are relaxing or hanging out. They know what it feels like to be optimized, as human beings, to do hard meaningful work. Gamers are willing to work hard all the time, if they’re given the right kind of work.

Widely regarded as the public face of gamification, Jane’s breakthrough thinking has inspired a new generation of contemplative thinkers, including myself.

With this in mind, I’d like to step you through several ways in which we can apply the cumulative brainpower of gamers on real world problems.

Using game modeling for social simulations has been a long-time goal of system designers

Introducing the Four Rules for Game Testing Our Way to a Better Future

As we look around us, we are constantly confronted with things that don’t make sense. We see systems that are poorly run, corruption and inefficiencies happening on a broad scale, wasted resources, people falling through the cracks, and well-meaning individuals having their best intentions compromised.

Game testing is a way of directing the spotlight of human intelligence onto the systems that run our communities, our countries, and our technologies prior to them being implemented.

Much like sitting behind the master control panel of life, game designers in the future will have the ability to simulate every human-based system on a large scale and ferret out the necessary tweaks and modifications needed to optimize them for real-life conditions.

Game Testing Systems Defined

Not to be confused with the product testing that happens prior to a video games being shipped, game testing, in this context, is a way of modeling and simulating real life conditions, and by adjusting and fine-tuning decision-point variables, game designers will have the ability to optimize systems and recommend changes for large scale implementation.

RULE #1 – Every system can be modeled, game tested, and optimized on a broad scale.

All good systems have built-in mechanisms for checks and balance. The best ones not only keep people honest, but also place reasonable limits on the cost of government.

While modeling a system and turning it into an interactive experience with simulated real-life risks and rewards will indeed be challenging, it is still very doable.

The part that most people miss is that simulations like these can be constructed, tested, and improved prior to implementation.

As an example, if the U.S. government had game-tested the Affordable Care Act prior to implementation, they would have found hundreds, perhaps thousands of ways to improve the system before hiring all the people and writing all the operations manuals.

Game testing systems like this can also be applied to every change in the tax code, social welfare, business incentives, legal changes to the constitution and much more.

RULE #2 – Future technologies will enable us to extend the field of play far beyond the digital world.

Whenever an injustice has occurred on an international level, our first reaction is that righting a current wrong should be handled by state-run policing agencies like Interpol or the FBI.

But as with all quasi-governmental agencies, politics, budgets and resources come into play.

With the recent rise in human trafficking incidents around the world, officials are struggling to piece together all the data to grasp the big picture of what’s happening. In short, this is an epic problem.

A company called Insecam has emerged as the first large-scale aggregator of over 73,000 unsecured webcams from around the world. If Insecam were to whole-heartedly endorse efforts to stop human trafficking, the number of cams on their network would mushroom to tens of millions overnight.

In just a few years it will also be easy to visualize a combination of flying drone cams, walking people cams, and drive-by car cams that make their way onto this network, with all of the cameras tied to facial recognition software.

If gamers were given just a few data points concerning sightings of individuals after they were reported missing, or pattern changes in the lives of suspected perpetrators, they could instantly stitch together critical points of intersection, begin building traffic diagrams, and profiles of those in close proximity to the ones being abducted.

If we consider the way Reddit users rallied after the Boston marathon bombing, this is not a far stretch at all. The trick will be to expand it into a global camera network that reaches into even the most remote places on earth.

Adding a series of gamification elements to the mix, such as reward-based incentives, either monetary or non-monetary, the pushback felt by human traffickers will be almost instantaneous.

Any trafficker that has their face plastered all over the 6:00 pm news or pushed out to countless millions on some gamer’s hot-issue hotline will not be in business long.

RULE #3 – Game testing is an iterative process requiring continuous ‘leveling up’ to optimize and fine-tune system performance.

One example that most people can relate to will be game testing our current tax code.

Though an expansive form of testing may start with just income tax, an expanded version of the test could include everything from sales tax, to estate tax, property tax, special district taxes and much more.

The result of this kind of testing may well be one new tax system that replaces all the old ones.

Technology is forcing a natural evolution in the way systems are being designed and operated. But the natural pace of change in most governments is woefully out of step with the pace of what’s happening in the rest of the world.

Competition between governments is generally a good thing, forcing everyone to try harder. But the best-run governmental systems in the future will be game-tested prior to implementation and retested, and retested, and retested.

Each new wave of testing will bring about more change, and the natural pace of system evolution will increase exponentially.

Future generations will have little understanding of how complex and badly our systems were run in the past.

When it comes to gaming, our only limits are our own imagination

Final Thoughts

Modeling and game testing our systems is a cause with epic meaning. The SIMS games are a good start but need to expand in scope and realism to give meaningful results.

Game designers will love the challenge. Game players will enjoy being part of something far bigger than themselves. Politicians will love it because it gives them a logical path to answers.

While I’ve purposely glossed over many of the details in implementing this strategy, it remains entirely doable and well worth the effort.

At the DaVinci Institute we’ve launched a new game design course as part of our DaVinci Coders School. In this context, it’s easy to see how game modeling and testing will soon become some of the most valuable skills in the world.

But I’d love to hear your thoughts on this matter. Am I just giving gamers another excuse for flittering their life away or does this have real potential?

]]>http://www.futuristspeaker.com/2015/02/four-rules-for-game-testing-our-way-to-a-better-future/feed/037 Critical Problems that need to be Solved for Drone Delivery to become Viablehttp://www.futuristspeaker.com/2015/01/37-critical-problems-that-need-to-be-solved-for-drone-delivery-to-become-viable/
http://www.futuristspeaker.com/2015/01/37-critical-problems-that-need-to-be-solved-for-drone-delivery-to-become-viable/#commentsTue, 27 Jan 2015 17:09:53 +0000FuturistSpeakerhttp://www.futuristspeaker.com/?p=4709

It all started when Toni, one of our staffers working on our flying drone workshop, asked me a simple question. She asked, “Since I live in an apartment complex, if I order something to be delivered by drone, where would they leave the package?”

This naturally led to a longer conversation and we instantly ticked off around a dozen other problems that will need to be overcome before we can expect drone delivery to become a viable option.

As a futurist, I’ve often gotten caught up in understanding what an emerging industry will eventually look like, but tend to gloss over the labyrinth of issues that will invariably plague the early stage pioneers willing to plow through the messy early years and take on all the risks.

Naturally there are many areas where flying drones could instantly be put to use, but when it comes to having a company like Amazon offer product delivery throughout its system, these simple flying machines suddenly take on “workhorse” status requiring levels of durability, automation, and system-building that are currently missing inside most conversations.

For example, early stage drone delivery will require a pilot for every package, making it an expensive option. Not only will pilots need to navigate their way to the destination, they’ll need to handle the empty return flight back as well. Eventually this will be automated, but it’s not a simple task.

Since electric drones have very limited battery life and range, delivery drones will most likely be fueled with gas or some other petrochemical. Gas powered drones have issues with noise and pollution that will cause many communities to start restricting their use.

With limited range and capacity, only a select few items will be eligible for this kind of delivery. When it comes to delivering food, companies will need to carefully monitor portion sizes because weight will become an increasingly important variable.

After considering many of these current deficiencies, I thought it might be helpful to begin listing some of the key technical, system, and regulatory challenges that lie ahead. At the same time, every problem creates an opportunity, and the sooner our emerging drone entrepreneurs learn how to capitalize on these problems, the sooner we’ll see this industry take off like many of us are imagining.

With that in mind, here are 37 near-term issues that will need to be solved.

The Coming “Cautionary Tale” Era

Fear sells. Most of the news coming from traditional media has a fear component to it. We tend to pay close attention to those things we feel threatened by, and those crafting the most effective headline have an ingenious knack for penetrating the fragile armor protecting our emotional self.

When hitchhiking was all the rage in the 1970s, news stories harping on a few outlier incidents killed societies first large scale attempt at ridesharing, drawing far more attention to the isolated tragedies rather than the mass-market successes.

They also put a huge damper on early social media companies like MySpace by creating headlines around a small number of young teens who were coerced into becoming victims of pedophile stalkers and leaving out the large scale benefits of this kind of social interaction.

I certainly don’t want to minimize the dangers and tragedies associated with these crimes. But every new technology and every new social system requires some level of oversight and management.

This line of thinking will drive a similar era of cautionary tales surrounding the flying drone industry, turning it into a battle for the minds of average consumers.

For this reason, drone industry leaders, startups, and representatives will need to take the initiative in forging guidelines in this unchartered territory. With foreign competition rapidly gaining the upper hand, this is one area of business that doesn’t have the luxury of allowing things to unfold in a normal fashion.

The intent of composing this list is not to put any sort of damper on this exploding new industry. Rather, the sooner people realize that solving these problems are ripe territory for entrepreneurial activity, the sooner a full-fledged commerce-driven wave of unmanned aerial vehicles can assume their labor-saving positions in the skies overhead.

1. Designated Delivery Spots – Much like mail delivery, drones will need designated places for package delivery. Commercial delivery to businesses will have different guidelines than home delivery.

2. Durability – Manufacturing drones durable enough to make 100 deliveries between scheduled maintenance and 10,000 flights over their lifetime will be an absolute necessity.

3. Conditional Awareness – Drones will invariable fly into unusual situations, and whether it’s swarms of bees, bird attacks, lightening strikes, or signal jammers, they will need to alert operators of problems as soon as they arise.

4. Black Boxes – Much like today’s commercial aircrafts, whenever a drone crashes, some sort of signaling device will be needed to allow for follow-up investigation and cleanup.

6. Override Kill Switch – Wireless signals are far from perfect. If a signal is lost, hacked, or hijacked, the drone must either return home or be removed from danger.

7. Drone Classification System – Drones are being created in thousands of different shapes and sizes with thousands of different capabilities. A comprehensive classification system will be needed to properly manage and regulate this industry.

8. Cargo Classification System – Cargo classification systems applied to ground-based shipping will need to be revised for the more volatile conditions associated with remote controlled airborne vehicles.

9. Drone Insurance – Drones, drone cargo, and drone businesses will soon become the largest new market for insurance companies.

10. Vehicle Licensing – Every drone that falls within certain classification guidelines will need to be licensed and insured.

11. Pilot Licensing – Those who fly drones will need to be tested and licensed in a less rigorous but similar way that airplane pilots are tested today.

12. Operator Licensing – People who load and unload cargo onto flying drones will also need to be licensed.

13. Weather Contingency Plans – Every drone will have to deal with extreme weather at one time or another. Any condition ranging from wind, to rain, snow, hail, extreme heat or extreme cold, will need a contingency plan for both the retrieval and safe delivery of the cargo.

14. Privacy Rules – Privacy means different things to different people, but flying drones with cameras, scanners, and sensors give nefarious people far more capabilities than ever before. Privacy rules will need to be established sooner than later.

15. Security Rules – Once a famous person’s delivery address becomes known, they run the risk of receiving unwanted packages, solicitations, threats, and even things like chemical attacks.

16. Drone Spam Rules – Much like junk mail and spam email, flying drones open up the possibility of receiving everything from annoying products samples to mean-spirited pranks. Rules for “drone hate crimes” and “drone bullying” will soon follow.

17. Noise Guidelines – The larger the drone and the greater the distance it has to cover, the larger the engine it will need to operate. Since electric drones only cover short distances, some form of petrochemical fuel will be needed, and these vehicles will be noisy. Rather than waiting for 10,000 communities to imposed their own one-off noise ordinances, it would be better for the industry to be proactive in this area.

19. Grasp and Release Mechanisms – People who set a package out front, wanting to send it across town, will require a pickup drone capable of automated grasp and release.

20. Aerodynamic Packaging – Packages attached to the bottom of a drone will need to be far more aerodynamic than the rectangular boxes most commonly delivered today.

21. Fly-Drive Capabilities – Because of trees, porticos, awnings, and overhangs, drones may need the ability to land on open space and drive to the appropriate delivery spot.

22. Collision Avoidance Systems – With the potential of flying into everything from power lines, to trees, windmills, Christmas decorations, and other UAVs, a comprehensive collision avoidance system will be necessary.

23. Crowded Skies Navigation System – At some point in the future there may be as many as 10,000 drones flying over a city in a given day. Not only will they need to avoid flying into buildings, trees, and commercial aircraft, they will need to avoid other drones as well.

24. Drone Operating System – An operating system is the most important software that runs on a computer because it defines how it functions. Computer buyers typically will choose between Android, iOS, Linux, or Windows for their operating system. Since drones have a different role and purpose, they will require an entirely different kind of operating system.

25. Shot from the Sky Recourse – Many disturbed individuals will view drones as a “form of target practice.” Drone owners and operators will need recourse for these situations.

26. Political Awareness – Paranoia is already rampant when it comes to all the bad things people can do with drones. For this reason its imperative that politicians be given special attention so they can understand the cost-benefit ratio associated with any of their decisions.

27. Consumer Awareness – Rather than letting the news media define the industry, this emerging industry needs to be proactive in defining itself.

Soon to become the policeman’s new best friend

28. Education for the Drone Police – Police will not only employ drones to assist in managing public safety, they will also use drones to monitor other drones. Drones are far more versatile and faster to deploy than virtually all other options officers have at their disposal.

29. Education for Drone Lobbyists – Drones will become one of the most highly regulated industries of all times. It is not too soon to start educating the influencers.

30. Education & Certification for Drone Pilots – With all their different configurations, styles, and function, drone pilots will require far different training than airline pilots do. Currently there are very few simulation programs available for practice.

31. Education for Drone Maintenance and Repair – People who service and fix drones will be in hot demand in the near future.

32. Drone Financing – As the need for instrumentation and safety equipment mushrooms, delivery drones will become far more expensive. As a result, drone financing will become a hot new area of business in the near future.

33. Flying Drone Bill of Rights – Do people have the right to “keep and bear drones?”

34. Docking Systems – People will eventually not want packages delivered onto their driveways. For example, any pizza left on a driveway becomes an open invitation for cats, dogs, and other stray animals. A better option would be to have some sort of docking system that would allow the drone to land and deliver the package into a secure area.

36. Airbag Crash Protectors – Accidents will happen and on occasion, drones will indeed fall out of the sky. To prevent large drones with heavy or dangerous payload from causing serious damage to people and property on the ground, some form of rapidly inflating airbag will be needed.

37. Invisible Fences – There will be many no-fly zones around the world and these zones will need the equivalent of an “invisible fence” to keep intruders out.

An Overarching Need for Standards

With a growing need for everything from standardized operating systems, to standardized packaging, standardized docking systems, and standardized emergency protocols, there is a looming need for literally thousands of new standards to be composed, and different ones for every classification, capability, and interoperability issue surrounding drones.

At the same time, every new invention, innovation, or business methodology opens the doors for even more standards.

As far as standards go, this problem-opportunity vein can be mined steadily for decades to come.

Replacing the FAA as the Regulatory Body

Watching the FAA representatives at last month’s congressional hearings on drones made it overwhelmingly obvious that the FAA is out of its depth as the appropriate regulatory body.

Just because drones and aircraft share the same skies does not mean the two industries are enough alike to share the same regulatory body. In fact, aviation expertise may actually be a detriment to allow this industry to properly unfold.

Too much regulation too early will stifle entrepreneurial drive and initiative. At the same time, too little regulation will open the doors for countless potential catastrophes. It’s a delicate balance and good to err on the side of caution, but important to not stifle creativity and development at the same time.

Final Thoughts

The recent crash of a drone on the Whitehouse lawn is a clear example of just how far this technology still needs to go.

Yes, the problems keep mounting, and this is only the short list.

The problems listed above may seem overwhelming at first, but its quite common for any emerging industry to have a myriad of issues to contend with. The challenge here is that the amount of time for solving them will need to be compressed into a fraction of that for past technologies like automobiles, electricity, airplanes, or telephones.

Expect a contentious playground in the years ahead. The unleashing has only just begun.

Business owners today are actively deciding whether their next hire should be a person or a machine. After all, machines can work in the dark and don’t come with decades of HR case law requiring time off for holidays, personal illness, excessive overtime, chronic stress or anxiety.

If you’ve not heard the phrase “technological unemployment,” brace yourself; you’ll be hearing it a lot over the coming years.

Technology is automating jobs out of existence at a record clip, and it’s only getting started. But at the same time, new jobs are also coming out of the woodwork.

In March, when Facebook announced the $2 billion acquisition of Oculus Rift, they not only put a giant stamp of approval on the technology, but they also triggered an instant demand for virtual reality designers, developers, and engineers.

Virtual reality professionals were nowhere to be found on the list of hot skills needed for 2014, but they certainly will be for 2015.

The same was true when Google and Facebook both announced the acquisition of solar powered drone companies Titan and Ascenta respectively. Suddenly we began seeing a dramatic uptick in the need for solar-drone engineers, drone-pilots, air rights lobbyists, global network planners, analysts, engineers, and logisticians.

Bold companies making moves like this are instantly triggering the need for talented people with skills aligned to grow with these cutting edge industries.

In these types of industries, it’s no longer possible to project the talent needs of business and industry 5-6 years in advance, the time it takes most universities to develop a new degree program and graduate their first class. Instead, these new skill-shifts come wrapped in a very short lead-time, often as little as 3-4 months.

Every new technology creates a need for more training. Very often it ends up being niche learning that takes place in-house with existing employees. But we’re also seeing a growing refinement of industries driving the need for huge new talent pools that currently don’t exist.

This is also an area where traditional colleges have missed the boat. Their attempt to put everything into a 2-year or 4-year framework has left the largest untapped opportunity ever for short-term full-immersion courses that help workers reboot their career.

The rapid growth in coding schools such as our own DaVinci Coders is only a tiny slice of a much larger Micro College pie that will get created over the coming years.

At the DaVinci Institute, our goal is to create a working laboratory for launching new Micro Colleges. These Micro Colleges will span the spectrum from “fly drone academies,” to crowdfunding schools, 3D printer designer schools, aquaponics farmers institute, and countless more.

Every year that I attend CES in Las Vegas I reach a point of sensory overload. It’s not just from all the people, lights, noise, and smells, but an overload of product strategies and emerging trends for the coming year.

With everything from R2D2 showing up outside the convention center, to meeting celebrities on the showroom floor, or coming face-to-face with a Paul Bunyan-sized electronic game-playing running shoe by Sketchers, or walking into a booth full of the coolest Chinese technologies ever made but not being able to talk to anyone because they don’t speak English, it’s not possible to describe all the sensations a person will experience at an event like this.

Everyone will experience CES in their own unique way, and the impressions they walk away with will help define their understanding of the world to come. Big time decisions are being made by the impressions made here.

As events go, it’s one of the largest in the world, attracting a record 170,000 people, including 45,000 from other countries. Out of 3,600 exhibitors, 375 of them were startups, with special attention being paid to them in an exhibit area called Eureka Park.

In so many ways, CES sets the tone for the global economy, with tens of thousands of private meetings being conducted in the background forcing more deals to be cut in a shorter period of time than virtually any other event on the planet.

Walking across the exhibit floors is quite a mind-expanding experience. Since I tend to use a radically different set of lenses to experience this show, I walked away with some rather unusual perspectives.

For this reason I’d like to mention twelve of the trends that everyone seemed to have missed at CES.

CES in 1967

History of CES

The first CES was held in June 1967 in New York City. It was a spinoff from the Chicago Music Show, which until then had served as the main event for exhibiting consumer electronics. The event had 17,500 attendees and over 100 exhibitors; the kickoff speaker was Motorola chairman Bob Galvin.

Competing for a while with CES was and event known as COMDEX, a computer expo held at various locations in the Las Vegas Valley, each November from 1979 to 2003. In 2001, the show was sold to Key3Media, a spin-off of Ziff Davis. Reeling from the 2000 economic downturn, Key3Media went into a Chapter 11 in February 2003 making that years show the final chapter in COMDEX history.

As a result, the Consumer Electronics Show has consolidated both COMDEX audiences with their own to make it the standard bearer for new product launches in consumer technology.

12 Emerging Trends that Everyone Missed

It’s easy to report on all the new technology that made its debut at CES. However, the more interesting stories, at least in my mind, are the less obvious shifts in business that can be derived from reading between the lines.

After spending a few days digesting everything, here are a few key observations about the world ahead.

Empty casinos at CES

1.) Traditional Gambling Usurped by Video Games – Even though the gambling industry is trying to tell the world it’s fine, the numbers simply don’t add up. In its 2013 State of the States report, the American Gaming Association reported that 39% of people age 21-35 spent time in casinos, with 90% saying they planned to return. Around the same time, a survey of 3,000 young adults in 16 markets in the Northeast found that only 18% of those under 35 had visited a casino in the past year.

At CES, I walked through dozens of major casinos along the strip and never once did I see a casino operating at more than 15% capacity. The biggest event of all in Vegas and the number of empty seats could fill several giant football stadiums.

However there could be a light at the end of this tunnel of gloom. Since young people would much rather play fast-action rapidly-advancing video games, and gambling laws for slot machines and roulette tables haven’t changed much since the 1950s, the best option may be to build large video game tournament centers and allow people to bet on the action, similar to betting on college basketball.

If casino owners in Vegas were to pick up on this idea, and you heard it first here, major hotels throughout the city could be retrofitted into video game tournament centers, where every major title from Call of Duty, to Middle Earth, Bayonetta, Wolfenstein, and Destiny would have annual competitions. Las Vegas could once again reclaim its position, only this time with a new kind of gambling that appeals in a huge way to today’s young people.

2.) Formation of the Underground Economy for Flying Drones – Flying drones are hot! With over 100 exhibitors at CES showing off the latest in drone tech and the FAA saying the whole industry needs to hold tight until sometime in 2017, the only direction this industry can possibly go is underground. Yeah, theres something very ironic about a highly visible industry involving flying objects creating an underground economy, but since the FAA doesn’t have an enforcement division, and since the operators will soon be miles away from where the machines are flying, it becomes a low risk crime.

That, coupled with a drone industry that is progressing at an exponential rate, while the FAA is still operating with a linear progression mindset, means that we’ll be seeing the equivalent of policemen blowing whistles running down the street trying to stop hyper jet drones flying at 2,000 mph in less than two years.

3.) First Generation Mood-Casters – The Internet of Things had a huge presence at CES as well as vendors offering every kind of Smart Home tech imaginable. The one thing both of these emerging industries has in common is their quest to make life more manageable for everyone.

But here’s the problem. Everyone is different.

So while giving people have access to 10,000 options for controlling the lights in their house or giving them streaming access to a million new songs, video games, or TV shows may sound appealing, all these decision points adds more stress to a person’s day, not less.

There is, however, a solution – Mood-Casting.

If every smart device were able to tap into the mood of people it came into contact with, it could easily make the decisions for them. The good news is that much of today’s wearable technology is giving off the signals necessary for these devices to instantly fine tune their decision-making processes.

For example, if a person walked into a room and the lighting was too harsh, sensors could read common stress indicators and keep making changes to the brightness, color, and intensity until it reached an optimal level.

Mood-Casters could be used to play the perfect music while working out, driving, or trying to relax. Every fire in a fireplace could be altered in both color and brilliance to match the desires of those nearby. Restaurants could adjust the smells in their dining rooms until they were optimized for guests on a moment by moment basis. (i.e. people may prefer a different smell while eating appetizers as opposed to eating dessert.)

Health tech everywhere at CES

4.) The Rise of the Healthcare Circumventionist – Healthcare is a hierarchical industry with doctors firmly entrenched on the top rung. It is also one of the world’s most lucrative industries. The entrepreneurial community knows this and has been plotting for years to find ways to tap into these revenue streams.

Doctors, in general, are not a big fan of the hundreds of medical devices coming out of the woodwork that are designed to circumvent their authority.

They’re even less of a fan of the big data analysts, who have never once studied medicine, that are telling them what to do.

In just a few years, many people will be switching from going in for a “medical checkup” to having a “health analytics screening.”

With hundreds of new entries into the emerging wearable tech industry coming out of the woodwork, in just a few years, most people will be able to make their own diagnosis before ever setting foot in the doctors office. The piece that entrepreneurs will have the greatest difficulty prying away from doctors is their ability to write prescriptions. But that too is destined to be undermined with technology work-arounds.

Have you met your virtual self?

5.) Becoming One with My Virtual Self – Every time I look at the Internet through the rectangular screen on my desk I wonder what it would be like to have a screen 10 times bigger. Better yet, what would it be like to eliminate the screen altogether.

In many ways, CES has been this ongoing competition to see which big industry player can cram the most TVs into their exhibit space in the most interesting fashion. Seeing more than a thousand 4K TVs integrated into one massive 40’ high video wall is impressive to say the least.

The days of “observer based” television is on the verge of being replaced with immersive VR, and eliminating the limitations of the viewing screen is only the first of 10,000 steps towards having the observer integrated into the entertainment experience.

Recent studies have shown that VR users can feel like they’re part of what’s happening just by being able to view they’re own hands. Viewable hands will lead to other viewable body parts, as well as friends, pets, and other non-real characters.

Just as 3D television is now loosing its annoying glasses, over time, virtual reality will loose the goggles and be blended into our real life experiences, with an entirely new genre’s of entertainment entering the fold.

6.) Smart Things Vs Smarter Things – In much the same way toy companies began giving a voice to every fuzzy and plastic creature in play land, companies are finding it increasingly easy to make intelligence the differentiator in virtually every new product.

With everything from connected toothbrushes, to smart heated insoles for your shoes, belts that automatically readjust themselves, and helmets that autocorrect their venting system to keep a person’s head cool, the Internet of Things is providing wireless intelligence and connectivity to everything we interact with.

At the heart of the Internet of Things is a micro sensor industry where every new kind of sensor will create an entire new industry, and the sensors themself are becoming exponentially cheaper, smaller, and more ubiquitous.

Projections show the world breaking the trillion sensor barrier in less than 10 years, and the 100 trillion sensor milestone around 20 years from now.

Sensors are meaningless if not connected to other parts of the “anatomy,” and that’s where MEMS (microelectronic mechanical systems), very small machines, come into play. MEMS are the devices that power everyday things like the Pebble Watch, smart light bulbs, and real-time blood-sugar monitors.

Even though the amount of “intelligence” being added to devices today is still primitive, the trend is towards a universe where devices become aware of changes made by other devices and respond accordingly.

Technologies like Intel’s button-sized Curie device is a step toward integrating far more processing power into wearable tech and its field of sensors.

All this integration is setting the stage for the emerging operating system battlefield.

The OS battles have already begun

7.) The Emerging Operating System Battlefield – In general terms, an operating system is the software operating in the background that manages hardware and software resources and provides a set of common services to make everything run better.

Today’s most common operating systems include Android, iOS, Linux, and Microsoft Windows. Each one has its own feature set that makes applications easier to build and more uniform.

The need for new types of operating systems became apparent when smartphones started entering the picture a decade ago.

As smart technology begins to enter nearly every field, the need for new operating systems has never been greater, and companies are racing to fill the void.

To give you some examples, the operating system for driverless cars will be distinct and different than the operating system for flying drones. At the same time we are seeing a need for separate operating systems for smart homes, the Internet of Things, wearable technology, health tech, learning tech, and robots.

Every unique operating system will have its own unique privacy and security issues, industry standards, language biases, and feature sets.

Those who control the rules of the game will have a huge advantage over everyone else. The OS wars are still in their infancy, and most of the winners will be decided over the next five years.

8.) Molecular-Level Scanners to Drive Tomorrow’s 3D Printing Industry – The 3D printing world is gaining lots of attention, but often lost in the shadows is a rapidly developing scanning industries with capabilities few ever imagined.

Not only will future scanning technologies be able to scan shapes with nano-scale precision, they will be able to parse exacting details of materials used in every molecule-thick layer of the object being scanned.

This means that someone will eventually be able to scan a smartphone, and with a multi-material 3D printer, reproduce the entire device in exacting detail.

For bio-printing, this means a person that has their finger cut off can have a replacement one printed and surgically connected in a way that few, if any, will know the difference.

IntelliPillow

9.) Shapeshifting Smart Products – When I first saw the IntelliPillow, a shapeshifting sensor-driven pillow that automatically knows when you’re sleeping on your side or back and adjusts itself accordingly, it reminded me of the columns I wrote on smart shoes and smart car seats over a decade ago.

The three things that the human body interacts with the most in life are the chairs we sit in, the shoes we walk in, and the beds we sleep in. People will pay dearly for any technology that can optimize any of these three friction points.

Using sensors to monitor layers of pressure, and either expanding gels or air systems to compensate for the changing conditions, shapeshifting products are destined to be all the rage in the coming years.

Bang & Olufsen ‘BeoSound Moment’

10.) Touch-Responsive Surfaces – As I came across the Bang & Olufsen ‘BeoSound Moment’ device, I realized I was looking at the world’s first touch-sensitive wood interface.

Extending far beyond glass touch screens of the past, touchable wood opens the door for any number of other touch sensitive surfaces like rock, stone, tile, or even concrete.

But who says we need to confine our thinking to hard surfaces. Will we be creating touch-sensitive carpets, leather, clothing, and upholstery? The answer will soon be an unequivocal yes.

11.) 3D Printing Combined with Robots Paves the way for Large Scale 3D Sculpting & Design – When 3D printing goes mobile, it opens the door for an entirely new kind of design and architecture.

If we can imagine a 3D printer that drives over, refills its tank with material, drives back and precisely extrudes the material into place, you’ll begin to understand the potential here.

Now, consider 100 or 1,000 mobile printers, either mounted on ground based or flying drones, working in swarms to build an entire building. That day is not too far off.

Most large structures of the future will be built this way. This will include everything from cruise ships, to baseball stadiums, hospitals, bridges, skyscrapers, hotels, apartment complexes, and giant sculptures.

Gone are the days of constrained thinking. Tomorrow’s mobile 3D printer technology will unleash a world of creative possibilities unlike anything we’ve ever imagined.

12.) The Massive Growing Need for Micro Colleges – Every new technology creates a need for more training. Very often it ends up being niche learning that takes place in-house with existing employees. But we’re also seeing a growing refinement of industries driving the need for huge new talent pools that currently don’t exist.

This is also an area where traditional colleges have missed the boat. Their attempt to put everything into a 2-year or 4-year framework has left the largest untapped opportunity ever for short-term full-immersion courses that help workers reboot their career.

The rapid growth in coding schools such as our own DaVinci Coders is only a tiny slice of a much larger Micro College pie that will get created over the coming years.

Final Thoughts

In the futurist world, trends are often based on loose signals derived from a few key data points and overlaid on some future timeline.

The trends I’ve described above are a combination of empirical evidence, past observations, industry research, and a fair amount of conjecture on my part.

In many cases, the 1+1=3 formula I use comes from a Situational Futuring technique I’ve been developing over the past few years.

There is great value in this line of thinking because it unlocks possibilities, and more importantly for both individuals and businesses, it can unlock key competitive advantages in a world where differentiation is always a hard fought battle.

As always, I‘d love to hear your thoughts. Please take a moment to weigh in on these and other topics that you find interesting.

In the beginning life was simple, just land and people. No borders, no restrictions, and no governments breathing down everyone’s neck.

Over time, cultures formed around a common language and geography determined many aspects of lifestyle. As an example, people who lived next to the sea oriented much of their life around fishing, while those further inland spent more time hunting and farming.

Traveling from one region to the next was difficult and dangerous. Before the time of Gutenberg’s printing press, the vast majority of people lived and died within 20 miles of where they grew up because they didn’t have access to reliable maps.

Later, as populations grew, we began to see the need for more sophisticated societies. At the heart of these advancements were cities adding conveniences like streets, water systems, protection from lawless individuals, and justice systems to add a sense of order to all those advancements.

As years progressed, cities banded together with towns and villages nearby to create better systems, form geographical boundaries, and promote common interests. These groupings of cities became countries, and governments sprang up to manage and organize their interests.

Countries were formed around a common geography, common languages, and common systems like currency and transportation.

The term “nation-state” came into play in 1648 with the treaty of Westphalia. This was an important turning point because countries transitioned from rouge protectorates to cultured political systems that recognized each others borders and were empowered to make deals with other nation-states.

Since 1648, countries, operating as nation-states, have become the most powerful entities on the planet. With large militaries to defend their interests and advanced monetary systems to build infrastructure, countries have become complex organisms with self-adapting properties.

However, when Internet started providing borderless connectivity, we began seeing national systems transition into global systems. As the need for borders became less clear, traditional ways of defining a country began to erode and the value of citizenship, less defined.

While countries struggle to maintain their role in the global community, people, as citizens of these nation states, are becoming far more mobile, wanting to be less confined by systems, rules, and geography.

So what comes next? Are we on the verge of yet another shift in global entities?

Understanding Where We’ve Come From

The nation-state will be 367 years old this year.

Political scientists have spent countless years refining the difference between the terms “nation” and “state.”

Generally speaking, a nation refers only to a socio-cultural entity, a union of people sharing culture and language (or languages).

A state refers to a legal/political entity that is comprised of: a) a permanent population; b) a defined territory; c) a government; and d) the capacity to enter into relations with other states.

Even though most leaders of countries today tend to oppose adding new nation-states to the mix because it disrupts the status quo, new entities pave the way for non-traditional thinking, new approaches to systems and infrastructure, and far more experimentation.

The Psychology of Borders and Reasons for Crossing Them

Borders create an un-natural impediment to the natural flow of human migration. People are both pushed and pulled across borders, and there are literally hundreds of reasons for each.

Some of the push factors include not enough jobs, poor living conditions, desertification, famine, political persecution, slavery, forced labor, poor medical care, war, loss of wealth, natural disasters, pollution, death threats, or desire for political or religious freedom.

Pull factors are similar but from a different mindset. They include things like more job opportunities, better living conditions, more political and/or religious freedom, better education and medical care, family connections, and better chances of marrying the right person.

One in five people crossed a national border last year

Six Ways in which Borders Have Become Less Meaningful

In 1950, 50 million people a year crossed national borders, last year it was 1.4 billion or nearly one out of every five people.

As numbers continue to climb, most customs and border patrol jobs will be automated out of existence. International rules based on corporate privilege like telecom’s roaming charges, tariffs, and tourism tax will soon lose their standing. Virtually every border-crosser has money, and the more welcome they feel, the more likely they will be to spend it.

Here are six ways that border significance will continue to decline.

1.) Global Awareness – As our access to the Internet improves, global awareness grows exponentially. Friends and family routinely post travel summaries on social media as they bounce from Kuala Lumpur, to the Tango Islands, to Aruba, and Timbuktu.

On the academic front, researchers who release reports in Moscow, Tokyo, or Singapore are having their finding read by people in Mexico City, Helsinki, and Belgrade ten minutes later.

This level of awareness is unprecedented and ripe with opportunity.

2.) Transitioning from National Systems to Global Systems – When we look at early systems such as written communications with Phoenician cuneiform, Mayan numerals, or the systems that had to be in place for engineering and building the Egyptian pyramids, it’s easy to see that system thinking has been around a long time. But global systems are a more recent innovation.

The most obvious advantage to global systems are the efficiencies they create. As an example, when a person who has spent their life hunting and fishing for food is able to walk to a store and purchase food, they suddenly have far more time in their life to do other things.

Similarly, when a company that has struggled to deliver product to the other side of the world can begin working with FedEx who provides painless global delivery, the company suddenly has time to focus on other critical problems.

3.) Language – Google Translate is an online service that does a reasonably good job. The system built by Franz Och at Google over the last decade can now support translation between 80 language pairs. In 2013, Google said that Translate served an average of 200 million people every day.

4.) Currency Networks – The 2009 introduction of Bitcoin was the first of many cryptocurrencies, each of which is pushing the transition from national to global currencies. What most don’t realize is that the wealth transferal networks created by cryptocurrencies is far more valuable than the currency itself. These currencies enable instant exchanges between national currencies (i.e. USD to Euro or Yen) with virtually no risk and very little expense.

5.) Global Transportation – In 2014 there were over 5.5 billion passenger flights around the world, a 4.9% increase over the year before. As air travel becomes more ubiquitous and available, we are seeing an increasingly fluid society

6.) Telepresence – For those who still find borders to be a painful barrier, telepresence has become the popular workaround. With near-perfect visuals and an in-the-room audio and sensory feel, this technology short circuits the cattle calls at the airport and replicates physical presence in virtually every way except for having a beer at a local pub afterwards.

“Transparency unimpeded will mean we will
eventually lose our ability to own things.”

Six Ways in which Countries are Becoming Dysfunctional

Borders may be diminishing in value, but many countries still use them to insulate their people and mask what’s truly happening behind the scenes.

1.) Dysfunctional Laws – With every country adding boatloads of new laws, travelers face literally hundreds of millions of possible laws they can run afoul of.

3.) The Complexity of Privacy – As transparency grows, we begin to know everything about everybody including their credit card and bank account numbers. Transparency unimpeded will mean we will eventually lose our ability to own things.

4.) Multi-National Workforce – People who do work for businesses in more than one country face double and sometimes triple taxation.

5.) Lack of Checks and Balance – Abuses by too-big-to-fail banks, Wall Street quants, and corporate shenanigans that almost took down the entire global economy have yet to be accounted for.

6.) Technological Unemployment and a Declining Middle Class – Jobs are being automated out of existence at a record pace and those working in middle class workers are losing ground very rapidly.

These indicators along with countless more are pointing to massive failures in global governance and the prospects of civil breakdowns on the horizon.

Adding Artificial Intelligence to Government

We live in a human-run world and the idea of having machines replace politicians, taking an automated driving test, or sitting before a robotic judge all sound rather foreign to the way things are done today. But changes like this are right around the corner.

If we return a library book a few days late and a machine assesses a $2 fine, most people are okay with that.

Similarly, taking a dog to a robotic vet that does automated testing, diagnoses the problem, and prescribes a cure will come as a welcome relief to many.

But having an automated online policy wonk listen to seven hours of testimony from industry experts and synthesize an entire new referendum feels sinister and creepy. Yet systems like this will remove political favors from the mix, remove campaign contribution bias, and take lobbyists out of the equation.

Paving the Way for Fractal Governance

Using this preamble to set the stage, I will attempt to describe the type of entities that I envision evolving from our current nation-state.

Since technology is exceeding governments ability to manage it, new global systems, or fractals, will emerge to offer a solution. Each fractal will be highly automated, and come with its own management structure.

I refer to them as fractals because each of them represents a tiny bit of order in an ocean of chaos. As fractals catch on we will begin to see new patterns of governance emerge.

Fractals represent the intersection of national and global governance.

I’ll begin by describing the Privacy Fractal which will only deal with privacy issues, but it will manage these issues in every member nation it manages to recruit.

Starting with a “Geneva Convention on Privacy,” the organization will establish global guidelines to deal with legal definitions, establish limits, handle abuses, and develop monitoring tools to signal whenever there is a privacy breach that has occurred.

In much the same way ICANN is the global authority for naming and numbering systems related to the Internet, the Privacy Fractal will establish itself as the global authority on privacy.

Fractal Governance will serve as a checks and balance to national governance, but only in a very limited scope.

Fractal Governance Defined

A Fractal is a narrow spectrum of global authority managed by an independent organization that operates outside of the control of individual nations. Member nations will assign representatives to the Fractal’s advisory board but the organization will operate outside of the control of any one nation.

Some Fractals will be mandated by large international assemblies such as a G20 Summit while others will originate organically, recruiting member nations on their own.

Fractals will be funded through nation-based membership dues.

Once a Fractal reaches critical mass, somewhere in the range of 20 member states, there will be a tendency for it to serve as the default authority in all matters related to its scope of governance.

Types of Fractal Organizations

The full range of possible Fractal Organization is only limited by our imagination, but the earliest ones will be those that address a specific problem for countries today.

Since countries don’t know how to deal with cryptocurrencies, we may see a “Cryptocurrency Fractal” mandated at the next G20 Summit. But that may be too broad of scope and a separate authority may be needed for Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin, and each of the cryptocurrencies gaining traction around the world.

With the concept of ownership being muddied by governments and police claiming authority to seize property, an “Ownership Fractal” may be needed to sort out all of the issues related to ownership around the world. Simply claiming rights based on the “spoils of war theory” needs to go away.

Fractal Governance will cover a wide range of topics from concrete to esoteric. Here are a few to help stimulate your thinking:

Global Accounting Standards

Business Ethics

Time Zones

Nanotech Measurement Standards

Incarceration Fractals

Ocean Pollution

Asteroid Mining

Marijuana Policy

Language Archive

Patent and Intellectual Property

GPS

Cross-Border Taxes

Telepresence Networks

Identity Standards

Wind Rights

Over time, turf battles between nations will be replaced by turf battles over the range and limits of Fractal authority.

Final Thoughts

There are many benefits to having separate countries around the world. They can preserve cultures, help spawn new industries,

But the biggest benefit is the competition that takes place between countries. This competition is pushing our standard to living to increasingly higher levels.

Done correctly, countries will welcome many aspects of fractal governance because it demonstrates attention to growing problem areas. People will have confidence in these expert-run systems as opposed to the political generalists, with lobbyists in the background, that are making decisions today.

Admittedly, this is a half-baked idea at best. These descriptions are crude and the overall concepts still rough. Does this sound like the direction we’re headed or am I way off base? For this reason, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Over the past year we’ve delved into a variety of different topics on FuturistSpeaker.com and naturally some have been more popular than others. Sometimes it’s the headlines, other times the graphics, but in the end it’s the subject matter and content that will determine which ones rise to the top.

Overall, we’re still finding a pervasive fear over jobs, privacy, and the economy, and a strong desire to understand what comes next. Our confidence in government has plummeted and the newest evil villain is artificial intelligence gone awry.

On the positive side of the equation, both flying drones and robots are hot, even though both have serious downsides. The Internet of Things is gaining in popularity along with its magical junior categories of enchanted objects and smart homes. The sharing economy is becoming a more defined niche and tiny homes are an emerging category that will soon be replaced with 3D printed disposable houses.

Even though Bitcoin hasn’t been a good investment in 2014, it’s been a banner year for cryptocurrencies in general. No, we still haven’t minted any cryptocurrency billionaires just yet, but as national currencies become increasingly dysfunctional, with security holes affecting nearly everyone, new opportunities are just around the corner.

At the DaVinci Institute, our work on Micro Colleges are paving the way for future generations to reboot their careers quickly to better match the emerging talent needs of business and industry.

With that in mind, here are the 2014 columns that attracted the most attention over the past 12 months.

Semantic Intelligence is a revolutionary new technology being developed by a tiny company called Mindaptiv located in the Innovation Pavilion in the Denver Tech Center, a hub of startup activity in Colorado.

With a core team of true believers on staff that filled the presentation room, the company’s CEO, Ken Granville, and chief technology visionary, Jake Kolb, took our team from the DaVinci Institute through a series of demonstrations and discussions to grasp the potential of what they are on the verge of unleashing.

On a zero to ten scale for rating tectonic shifts on the Richter Scale of computing, Sematic Intelligence is drawing lines on parts of the chart that haven’t ever been written on before. Continue reading.

Much of the world around us has been formed around key pieces of infrastructure. Most see this as a testament to who we are as a society, and part of the cultural moorings we need to guide us into the future.

In general, infrastructure represents a long-term societal investment that will move us along the path of building a more efficient, better functioning, society. And usually it does … for a while.

But infrastructure comes in many forms and as we build our elaborate networks of pipes, wires, roads, bridges, tunnels, buildings, and waterways, we become very focused on the here and now, with little thought as to whether there might be a better way. Continue reading.

As houses are printed with non-flammable materials, there will no longer be a need for fire insurance. Once houses can be reprinted for less than the cost of re-roofing them today, we may eliminate the need for house insurance altogether.

Once we are able to remove the transaction costs from housing, our populations become infinitely more fluid. A fluid population is a fickle one, often moving on a whim, rather than the long drawn out process that it is today.

City populations will expand and contract in dramatic fashion, often reflecting people’s changing attitudes associated with political decisions, local elections, increased criminal activity, changing tax rates, and much more.

So far we’re just scratching the surface. The rest of the disposable housing revolution will follow shortly.Continue reading.

Future industries will be able to leverage tomorrow’s technologies far faster than anything today.

They will have the ability to quickly adapt, rapidly influence, and perform nearly instantaneous transactions. For these reasons, it is entirely possible for a breakthrough to occur that launches an entirely new industry, and with highly leveraged processes, start producing trillionaires in less than ten years.

It is entirely possible for a breakthrough to occur that launches an entirely new industry, and with highly leveraged processes, start producing trillionaires in less than ten years.” With this in mind, here are the future industries that rose to the top along with a brief explanation as to why they were chosen. Continue reading.

Flying drones can roll along the ground, stick to the side of a building, float in a river, dive under water, jump onto a building, climb a tree, or attach themselves like parasites to the sides of trains, ships, and airplanes.

One moment they can be hovering in front of you and the next they can fly off at the speed of sound, disappearing into the clouds. Combining all these capabilities, attributes, and special features into one single device will open up a world of possibilities unlike anything before in all history.

Here’s a brief overview of the magical world being unleashed with flying drones. Continue reading.

This works particularly well in a brainstorming environment where thoughts and ideas can be quickly sketched out, described, or clarified so more can be added. Inside these moments of micro-futuring is where the real treasures live. Continue reading.

Today, the amount of time it takes to build ships and skyscrapers, create massive data storage centers for all our growing volumes of information, or produce global wireless networks for all our devices has dropped significantly. But along with each of these drops is a parallel increase in our capabilities and our expectations.

For these reasons, I’d like to reframe the discussion by proposing three “Laws of Exponential Capabilities.” Here’s why this is so critically important. Continue reading.

The invasion of high-frequency trading machines is now forcing capitalism far away from anything either Adam Smith or the founders of the NYSE could possibly find virtuous.

We’re not about to let robots compete in the Olympics, driverless cars race in the Indianapolis 500, or automated machines play sports like football, basketball, or baseball. So why is it we allow them to play a role in the most valuable contest of all, the world wide stock exchange?

With crude forms of AI now entering the quant manipulator’s toolbox, we are now teetering dangerously close to a total collapse of the stock market, one that will leave many corporations and individuals financially destitute.

Here is why this should be ringing alarm bells all over the world. Continue reading.

Predicting future jobs is an exercise that involves looking at future industries and speculating on ways in which they will be different than the workforce today. Business management, engineering, accounting, marketing, and sales are all necessary skills for the future, but the work involved will also be different.

At the same time there will be many less-obvious positions that will need to be created. This is about those less-obvious positions.

The following is not an exhaustive list, nor do these job titles all have good explanations. Rather, this column is intended to be a thought-generator, an idea-sparker, to help you draw your own conclusions.Continue reading.

Final Thoughts

As a professional speaker, my talks have once again taken me all over the world, and over the past year I’ve been to Auckland, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Istanbul, Toronto, Rome, Seoul, Latvia, and far too many places in the U.S. and Canada to list here. I’ve shared the stage with some amazing people at some amazing companies. While I do have some speaking topics listed, every talk is custom tailored to the audience I’m working with. I love working on unusual topics, provided they fall with my main focus of “technology-driven change.”

My newest book is getting close and should be released early in 2015. Considerable effort has already been put into this new manuscript and will have some unusual concepts for all of us to debate.

The overall readership on FuturistSpeaker.com has more than doubled over the past year, setting the stage for some terrific opportunities that I’ll be talking about soon.

The year is 2026, and what began as a simple quiet evening at my local library, culminated with me coming face to face with one of the most reviled men in all history.

As I entered the library, I caught a glimpse of a new room they had just completed with a labeling above the door that read, “Conversations Room.”

Naturally curious, I asked one of the librarians about it, and she quickly explained how they had just installed a “virtual presence” machine and it would enable anyone to have a “live” conversation with famous people throughout history.

That brief explanation was all it took. In about two seconds I had totally forgotten the reason I came to the library, took my seat, and started tinkering with the controls to figure out how it worked.

No, Hitler wasn’t my first choice, or even my last choice, but after hitting a few wrong clicks, he showed up as an option so I decided to give it a go.

After a few technical flickers, he suddenly appeared, and I was taken back by how real he looked and how authentic it felt. He came from the back of the room, walking rather stiffly, took a seat, and began fiddling with one of his shoes.

I introduced myself with a short, “Hi, I’m Thomas Frey,” and he immediately sat up and gave me a piercing stare.

“Why are you here?” was his response. It was in English but with a German accent.

I was momentarily stunned with the question and fumbled my words trying to come up with the right response. “I-I-I’ve been doing research on WWII and came here to meet you,” was all I could muster.

He continued gruffly, “There’s been several attempts on my life and I’m not sure who I can trust. Who do you report to?”

His paranoia was palpable, but it was his authoritative stare and commanding presence that demanded my full attention. I suddenly got a sense of what it was like being one of his commanders and having to answer to this intensely imposing figure.

In retrospect, I was terribly unprepared for this conversation. I had mistakenly assumed I’d be the one asking the questions, but even as a three-dimensional avatar, this was someone who very much needed to be in control.

Seething with Paranoia

It took me about 45 minutes to gain his trust. I didn’t realize it would be this hard.

At one point I asked a flippant question, “Why are you so worried about who you can trust, you’ve been dead for over 70 years?”

He leaned forward and started screaming, “If I am so dead, how is it that I’m sitting here in front of you answering stupid [expletive] questions about things I don’t give a [expletive] about?

The tone of his voice sent shivers up my spine. After taking a deep breath and watching the trembling veins in his face subside, I decided I never wanted to do that again.

I was pretty sure he didn’t have the ability to order soldiers to come to my home, but I was becoming less certain of that as the conversation proceeded.

What had started off as something I thought would be a rather lame casual conversation with a historical figure had suddenly become one of the most intense experiences in my entire life.

Resorting to a few softball questions, I asked him what it was like growing up in Germany.

He added a bit of personal history. “My papa was a farmer and we raised bees. I had two older brothers and an older sister, but they all died as young children. I was the first one to make it past the age of three.”

He continued, “As a child, I wanted to become a artist and attend art school. But my papa insisted I go to Realschule, a technical school where I could become an apprentice and earn a living. I hated him for this. Art was very important to me and I’ve spent countless hours drawing cartoons and creating art throughout my life.”

Eventually I began asking him about Germany’s progress in making nuclear weapons. I had heard they were close, but I thought he could add a bit more detail.

After fidgeting for a couple seconds, clearly uneasy about revealing too much, he began giving me the names of people and details about some of their top-secret research.

When I asked him about his dislike of the Jews, he became visibly agitated, filling the room with German swearwords. “When my younger brother died of measles, it was a Jewish doctor who failed to cure him. When my mother became ill, it was more Jewish doctors that let her die.”

Now he was on a rant. “They were the ones who causes us to lose WWI. They controlled all the banks, the factories, and the stores. And we lost because they thought the war was costing us too much money.”

His anti-Jew diatribe continued for another 10 minutes.

After the Call

The entire discussion lasted 90 minutes, far longer than I had anticipated.

After saying goodbye, I began to grasp how stressful the call had been. My shoulders were tense, I was sweating profusely, and I realized I had even been clenching my jaw and grinding my teeth.

I hadn’t been a fan of Hitler before the call and was even less of one now. But in many ways, everything made much more sense. I understood how an imposing figure like this could rise to power and some of the underlying creepiness of why he did the things he did.

Reading historical accounts of his life suddenly seemed so one-dimensional.

Students who prepared for one of these encounters in the future would have far more reasons to do their homework first and be prepared for this kind of confrontation.

As it turned out, Hitler was one of the early “Conversations Room” prototypes, and a team of programmers, movie directors, gamification experts, and historians had spent countless hours stitching this character together from multiple video, audio, photo, and written fragments of information.

Developing technology for a “Conversations Room” is not as far away as some might imagine

An Example of Situational Futuring

The scenario I’ve just taken you through is an example of what I call “situational futuring.” It describes a real life situation taking place with soon-to-be-invented technology, and adds both personal and emotional elements to make it feel genuine.

I could have chosen any number of different historical figures, but Hitler seemed to be the one that would most stand out in a reader’s mind.

In retrospect, it also establishes a valid reason why libraries will still exist in the future. Not only will they exist, they will become a showcase for emerging technology that will enhance both the educational and informational experience for future generations.

Final Thoughts

The path to a better future comes with an enhanced understanding of the past.

In a similar fashion, the path to a better future will come with a deeper understanding of the nuances of future life altering technologies.

Technology will redefine our cultures, our lifestyle, and our value systems. There will always be unintended consequences, and some of it will be difficult to manage, but new technologies will never stop coming.

The more we focus our attention on the future, the better we can prepare for it. It’s in everyone’s best interest to stop getting blindsided by the future.

This is just one example of an anticipatory thinking technique to help plan for tomorrow. Over the coming months I plan to featuring several more.

With this in mind, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the effectiveness of this technique. Was it captivating, realistic, a bit off the mark, or were you simply put off by the selection of Hitler? Please comment below.